DEPARTAMENT DE FILOLOGIA ANGLESA I DE GERMANÍSTICA Phonetic Study of Dialect Writing in Tom Leonard’s Six Glasgow Poems Treball de Fi de Grau/ BA Dissertation Author: Helena Barbara Style Muñoz Supervisor: Maria-Josep Solé i Sabaté Grau d’Estudis Anglesos June 2018 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my supervisor Prof. Maria-Josep Solé for considering my original proposal and for helping me develop it into this work. I really appreciate all her guidance, advice, dedication and encouragement. I would also like to thank my teacher Prof. Núria Gavaldà, for being the one who sparked my interest in the field of Phonetics, an interest I am sure I will never lose. I am grateful for my parents’ unconditional love and support, and for teaching me one of the most valuable lessons I have ever learnt, which is to enjoy learning. I am also grateful for my classmates who have now become my friends, and especially Paola for being so supportive and always believing in me. I would like to dedicate this paper to all my teachers here at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona whose teachings have not only come together in this work, but will live within me forever. Table of contents Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………..1 1. Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..2 2. Scotland and Glasgow: the linguistic situation……………………………………………3 2.1 Scotland………………………………………………………………………………..3 2.2 Glasgow………………………………………………………………………………..6 3. Dialect in literature………………………………………………………………………...8 4. Features analysed and procedure…………………………………………………………12 5. Analysis…………………………………………………………………………………..13 5.1. Segmental features: A. Consonants………...………………………………………………………………………14 1. L-vocalization……………………………………………………………………...14 2. Rhoticity…………………………………………………………………………...15 3. H-dropping…………………………………………………………………………16 B. Vowels………...…………………………………………………………………………..17 4. Unstressed vowels…………………………………………………………………17 5. NURSE Merger……………………………………………………………………18 6. KIT and DRESS lexical sets………………………………………………………19 7. LOT, THOUGHT, NORTH lexical sets…………………………………………..21 8. Diphthongs………………………………………………………………………...22 5.2. Grammatical features: 9. Verbal negation……………………………………………………………………24 5.3. Lexical features: 10. Lexical items……………………………………………………………………..24 6. Conclusions………………………………………………………………………………26 References……………………………………………………………………………………28 Appendix……………………………………………………………………………………..29 Appendix I. The poems………………………………………………………………29 Appendix II. List of lexical items……………………………………………………32 i Abstract The following paper studies dialect writing in terms of its significance in society, the reception of its use in literature and the ways it represents an accent or dialect. In order to do so, the paper first examines the linguistic situation of Scotland, the literary tradition of which is famous for its dialect writing and a good example of how identity is conveyed through the language represented in a text. Secondly, the paper looks at research done on dialect writing in order to comprehend its relevance in literature and the reception it has had throughout the years. Finally, an analysis of Tom Leonard’s Six Glasgow Poems that focuses on the representation of features of the poet’s Glaswegian working-class accent is carried out. The results show that Leonard’s dialect writing is successful in conveying an individual’s speech and that dialect writing as a literary means is important for questioning the prestigious status of English standard accents and the political ideologies associated to them. Keywords: Dialect writing, Glaswegian, Tom Leonard, non-standard accent, identity. 1 1. Introduction Because of the significance of dialect writing in literature and in society, this paper aims to attain a better understanding of this style of writing by examining the poetry of Tom Leonard, who employs dialect writing in his work to capture his Glaswegian working-class dialect. Dialect writing as a technique is not just done for aesthetic purposes, but also as a means to convey political messages not just through the content of the texts but also through their form. Therefore, this paper will first consider the linguistic situation in Scotland starting by looking at its history in order to understand the country’s present conditions regarding language. It will then specifically focus on the city of Glasgow in order to be able to contextualise the poetry of Tom Leonard and understand the significance of the use of his dialect. Secondly, the paper will delve into past research done on dialect writing in terms of its role in literature and its reception. This is of interest within the whole paper because it will later contribute to the analysis part of the selected poems that concentrates on the way the dialect in question is represented. One of the most relevant points mentioned in this section comes from McKay’s (2010) work, where he states that there is no standardised way of writing in dialect, which is of crucial importance for the analysis. Thus, the analysis is not an examination based on established norms, meaning that there are no theses to be proven. Instead, the study will consider dialectal features that emerge in the text and it will look at the way they are represented. As a result, the most substantial part of the paper is the analysis section of Tom Leonard’s Six Glasgow Poems published in 1969. The analysis was carried out by first transcribing the poems into standard English with the guidance of recordings of the poet reciting the poems, and then looking for patterns of deviation from English standard 2 orthography. When a number of recurring patterns were found, research was done to see whether they accounted for actual features of the Glaswegian working-class dialect. As a result, this paper does not offer an exhaustive account of Glaswegian features, but only a selection of those which are repeatedly represented in the poems. 2. Scotland and Glasgow: The Linguistic Situation 2.1 Scotland First and foremost, it is important to note that the linguistic situation in Scotland differs from the one in the rest of Great Britain. An example of Scotland’s unique linguistic scene is offered by Wells (1982), who discusses the status Received Pronunciation has in Scotland in comparison to England, Wales and Northern Ireland. In England, especially, Received Pronunciation, also known as BBC English, enjoys a prestigious status which does not coincide with the status it has in Scotland, since “a Scottish accent can be prestigious in a way that a local English accent is not.” (Wells, 1982: 393) This is a relevant example because it shows how language is laden with social and political connotations that are closely tied to a country’s political and historical past and present. Corbett, McClure and Stuart-Smith (2003) offer a brief account of the history of the languages in Scotland in The Edinburgh Companion to Scots, where they explain that Gaelic, a Celtic language, had spread into Scotland from Ireland and it had become the dominant language in Scotland for centuries, where it co-existed with Old English and Anglian dialects, one of which was Northumbrian Old English and was predominant in the south of Scotland. By 1400, a Norse-influenced variety of Middle English known as Inglis, or Early Scots, had become the lingua franca of urban lowland Scotland with the establishment of Scottish burghs, brought to Scotland by King David I and all the incoming settlers from England. Eventually, 3 Inglis replaced Scottish Gaelic both socially and geographically so that it was spoken throughout Lowland Scotland up to the Moray Firth and it went up the social hierarchy replacing Gaelic and French as the spoken language of the aristocracy and it became an emergent national language, that we nowadays know as Scots. As a result of close political ties with England during the sixteenth century, Scots started to show signs of anglicisation, which indicated the growing prestige of English and the decline of Scots as a national language. It was the Treaty of Union of 1707 that united the kingdoms of Scotland and England, with the parliament in Westminster, and from then onwards, English became the prestige language in Scotland (Corbett, McClure & Stuart-Smith, 2003: 4-15). Therefore, the spoken language in Scotland in the eighteenth century was “Standard English with a Scottish accent, that is, rather than Scots” (Wells, 1982: 394), which is what nowadays we know as Scottish Standard English (SSE), that is grammatically and lexically very similar to standard English found in the rest of Great Britain, but phonetically and phonemically like Scots, which was not completely replaced and it remained the language used in unofficial and domestic contexts (Corbett et al. 2003: 4-15). Due to the close co-existence of Scots and Standard Scottish English, initially the two varieties were in a situation of diglossia, meaning that they were two separate yet related varieties with one variety (Scottish English) being the ‘high’ variety and the other (Scots), the ‘low’ variety. Each one was used in different social contexts and by different speakers of the community, usually those of upper and middle-classes speaking in the ‘high’ variety. This situation lasted approximately until the twentieth century in lowland Scotland, but from then onwards the relationship between Scottish English and Scots has shifted into one of diaglossia, because of the close contact the two varieties have found themselves in. This has led to the emergence of intermediate forms of speech which have features of both the ‘high’ and ‘low’ 4 varieties, and most speakers in Scotland can drift, rather than shift, from one variety to the other depending on the conversational context (Corbett et al.: 4-15). According to Wells (1982), in present-day Scotland we find a linguistic continuum throughout much of southern, central and north-eastern Scotland, although in some areas like the Shetlands the situation is still diglossic. In the case of the lowlands, where Glasgow is located, speakers situate themselves at some point along the continuum and drift from the more standard forms at one end, known as Standard Scottish English, to the least standard forms at the other end, which are known as (Broad) Scots (Wells, 1982: 395).